It must have been a good bill. A hoped-for and long-awaited reform, made urgent by the horrific death of the little girl from Granby.Have
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Bill 15 amending the Youth Protection Act had to bring about a culture change. Finally, the children would no longer be tossed about from one family to another. The DPJ would no longer seek to reintegrate them at all costs into sometimes unstable and dangerous biological families.
The reform was to respond to the recommendations of the Special Commission on Children’s Rights and Youth Protection, chaired by Régine Laurent. In short, there should have been consensus. It shouldn’t have been controversial.
And yet, it becomes. In the craziest of ways.
It was supposed to be a good bill, but on the conspiratorial planet of Quebec, it became a diabolical plan by the state to tear children away from their parents. Nothing less.
For days now, just about everything Quebec has conspiracies has been buzzing about on the web. They invite the population to write emails to the members of the parliamentary committee on health and social services, which begin consultations on Bill 15 on Tuesday.
As a result, elected officials are inundated. “I received more than 1,000 emails in one week,” said Liberal MP Monsef Derraji, a member of the commission. On his Facebook page, people write to him: “Is it true that we are going to take our children away from us because we refuse vaccination? »
Each time, the member must correct the situation. On the phone, he had to reassure a mother in panic. This whole affair worries him to the highest degree. “It’s really not healthy for democracy. The government must do everything to explain its bill and reassure families. »
There is something to be worried about. Elected representatives from all parties, who are only doing their job as parliamentarians, are compared to Nazis and child traffickers.
“Hitler had bluntly said, ‘Give me a generation of children and I’ll rule for life.’ That’s what they want to do. They want to take the child out of the hands of the parents and into the hands of the state,” says Ken Pereira, a former whistleblower turned nonsense thrower, in a recent video hosted by André Pitre.
The latter, figurehead of the conspiracy movement, warns the “psychopaths” in power in Quebec: “Leave our children alone. You will pay. You will pay in this life or the next. »
Then, André Pitre asks himself: “Why would they want the State to be the parent of the child if it is only to traffic them? »
Others have relayed this stupid theory, especially on Facebook. Some videos accumulate tens of thousands of views. Little by little, the rumor swells.
In the streets of Ottawa, we saw signs demanding respect for “parental primacy” through those that proclaimed “Fuck Trudeau”. An online petition now has more than 10,000 signatures.
It’s big. It’s ridiculous. But it is not harmless. The danger is seeing what happens on the conspiratorial planet percolate into the real world. “There are crazy people everywhere. We don’t know what will be the trigger to show their dissatisfaction,” says Monsef Derraji.
We don’t know, but we know it’s possible. Remember the pizzagate. Thousands of Americans believed Hillary Clinton relatives were running a massive pedophilia ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
At the end of 2016, a man had traveled from North Carolina to the American capital to save the children supposedly detained in the cellar of the pizzeria. Armed with an assault rifle, he had held an employee at gunpoint, he had fired inside the restaurant…
I am not saying that an armed man will show up at the National Assembly. I say that many people are convinced that the state is plotting to take their children away from them.
I say that the zeitgeist worries me.
I know very well that I will not convince anyone.
Those who are convinced that we live in a dictatorship are equally convinced that the media are under the thumb of dictators. With these people, my power of persuasion is nil.
But the web giants should do better. Much better. Facebook, YouTube and the like shouldn’t let toxic theories spread like this to the public. They should counter these massive misinformation campaigns. Too often, they stand there, arms folded, watching us slip into the post-truth era.